The Indian Odyssey of Michael and Nix

Another early morning photo mission – Nix got some good images at Crocodile Ghat and the Ganesha Temple. India is an amazing country for photographic opportunities. There’s always something interesting going on somewhere if you look for it (and are willing to get up early enough to capture it). While wandering through town we came upon a crowd of school kids (at 7am – there’s that Indian work ethic again) who were laughing at us. It occurred to me as we said hello and walked past that we interpret everything through the filter of our culture and upbringing. Indian kids don’t seem to have a bad bone in their bodies, so the laughing was almost certainly innocent. If I walked past a bunch of school kids in London and they started looking at us and laughing, the chances are they would mean offense or harm in some way. Another anthropological wonder of the world. There do seem to be lots of them. Later when we sat down to have chai the notice board (good that I noticed it) next to our heads was filled with flyers for yoga and meditation courses. All of them were run by Westerners. It seems to me that Westerners are searching a lot more than Indians are. Indians found their groove a few thousand years back and have stuck with it. We’ve long since lost ours and are trying to find it again. I am sure there are a myriad of reasons for this. Focus on our old friend God Money is a big one I think. It could be that as India grows economically it will change for them too, and they’ll be coming to us in the West for yoga lessons and meditation retreats ;) I’ve noticed that Gokarna has a lot of one eyed guys. It looks (no pun intended) that they’ve been blinded – the eye has gone completely white. It’s strange that the blindness is in one eye only in the cases I have seen.... Maybe there’s some obscure local illness that causes one eyed blindness in males. More likely they’ve been drinking too much of their local moonshine (which Nix tells me can lead to blindness. I’m also told a few other things lead to blindness but I’m not sure they apply here). Or perhaps they have taken playing pirates to another level of realism.